Induction of Association Rules: Apriori Implementation
Christian Borgelt, Rudolf Kruse · COMPSTAT · 2002
We describe an implementation of the well-known apriori algorithm for the induction of association rules [Agrawal et al. (1993), Agrawal et al. (1996)] that is based on the concept of a prefix tree. While the idea to use this type of data structure is not new, there are several ways to organize the nodes of such a tree, to encode the items, and to organize the transactions, which may be used in order to minimize the time needed to find the frequent itemsets as well as to reduce the amount of memory needed to store the counters. Consequently, our emphasis is less on concepts, but on implementation issues, which, however, can make a considerable difference in applications.